Smells Like Turkey Soup

 

Got up early.  Had forgotten to cancel a call that was thrown on the calendar last week.  No.  Not this morning.  I’m gonna flop around in bed and try to finish “H is for Hawk.”  It’s Friday, and there is nothing I have to do except clean up after yesterday.  Once the sun is up, I set up shop in the kitchen and start emptying the dishwasher.  The bird is out on the porch, covered.   Piles of white meat, plates of dark meat remained un-carved, to be pulled from the carcass.  I filled one and then another plate and separated all the bones and plopped them into the largest pot we had.

 

The best sandwich of the year is the turkey sandwich you make the day after Thanksgiving.  I took down one or another half loaf we had up in the cabinet and set to work toasting all this bread and preparing a half a dozen sandwiches and eating up two and a half of them.  The kitchen smells like turkey soup.  Everyone save the vegan is digging the crunchy turkey sandwiches as they make their way out, one by one, the morning after.

A walk?  My wife suggests we head out and I’m fine with that.  I wanted to show her the hemlock that shoots twenty feet up into the air right besides a much bigger oak.  Is this just circumstance or is this a specific strategy the wily hemlock employ?  (I looked and it appears to be the case, they grow in the shade of other trees.)  I convince her to plod off the trail for twenty paces or so and contemplate this slow decades’-old drama.  The color of the hemlocks is a unique variant of dark green.  I share with her what I’d learned about the big eight-hundred year-old trees that used to populate these woods, until they were all harvested for the tanning industry. 

We went right off the trail at Cedar Lane and over to Plains Road and followed the approximate path of the rail trail to the right and the Walkill River to the left and made our way back towards town.  Plenty of young hemlocks along this path and some towering white pines and dramatic locust trees with their gnarly bark.  Woodland Drive forms a horseshoe.  I remember it being pretty non-eventful from my drive through and I tell my wife as much.  Still, we walk on along the road and consider the homes that seem to all be packed in rather tightly.  At the northwest corner we consider where it might be possible to cut through a yard and get over to the trail.  I’d have done that once upon a time, but hesitate, as an adult.  All of this must have been the property of one estate that got divided up into sub lots like this about fifty years ago. Back on the main road, we are soon curving right and joining back up with the rail trail crossing just beyond Sojourner Truth Park.  

 

 

 

Friday, 11/27/20